The original superfood bar packed with real whole foods and original superfood greens powder. So you’ve heard it said, over and over again, “If you want to lose weight you have to burn more calories than you consume.” Before you decide to eat just a salad today because you want to lose weight, understand that losing weight is not always a good thing. This entry was posted in Fitness, Fitness Tips, Men's Health, Weight Loss, Women's Health and tagged dieting, easy dieting, fad diets, how to keep weight off, losing weight, quick weight loss by Christopher Daniels.
To lose weight you must create a negative energy balance: calories taken are less than calories expended.
The main way your body responds to very low calorie diets or crash diets, is to protect its fat stores and instead use lean tissue or muscle to provide it with some of the calories it needs to keep functioning.
Thanks in part to The Fast Diet, the new best-selling diet book import from the UK that promotes eating what you want for five days then fasting for two days, along with other fasting-related diet books, we’re getting more and more questions about whether or not fasting or alternate day eating is a good approach to lose weight and stay healthy. These diet books tout a magical metabolic shift to “burning fat” as a result of abstinence. Bottom line: It doesn’t matter what type of calorie-restriction approach you take, whether it’s a vegetarian approach, Mediterranean-style low-fat, low-carb or fasting. We say a smart solution for reducing your daily calories in a healthy way is to use our calorie controlled meal plans that will teach you how to eat 1,200 to 1,800 calories-a-day from wholesome real foods.
If you lose water or muscle, you lose your ability to burn calories – making it a whole heck of a lot easier to get fat again!
Here’s why… When you go on a low calorie diet the body begins to burn muscle as energy. In order to post comments, please make sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled, and reload the page.

Result: Fat, glycogen and muscle are used for energy to make up the caloric deficit and ideally weight is lost and fat stores are reduced. This is because your body uses a brilliant primal survival system that is thought to have evolved over thousands of years as a defense against starvation and means the body becomes super efficient at making the most of the calories it does get from food and drink.
Fat is the body’s energy reserve and when you consume fewer calories than your body needs, your body turns to fat for energy.
Alternately—and what is recommended in popular diet books like The Alternate-Day Diet—is eating only sparingly (just 500 to 600 calories) on “fasting” days and regular meals on non-fasting days.
While it’s true that long-term calorie restriction does wonders for worms, flies, yeast and mice, in fact there’s virtually no human research in this area to support such claims.
Such a shift however is the natural result of calorie restriction in general, and not the method used to reduce calories. Excess fat causes many health problems and most of us would agree that fat doesn’t look too pretty either. Your body becomes more efficient at preserving extra calories as fat, called the “starvation response”. Start trying to build muscle – hit the gym, start slow and work on basic, proper muscle-building form. However, losing weight and losing fat are two different stories. Weight loss does not necessarily equal fat loss.
When you are crash dieting your body does not know that there are a dozen restaurants and supermarkets around the corner and takes steps to protect it. However, when your body feels threatened (crash diet) the body’s leptin levels (a hormone that liberates stored body fat) decrease and only allows fat cells to release energy in order to sustain your most basic bodily functions.

Ultimately the only way to reduce your fat stores (excess body fat) is to sustain a long-term energy deficit, which forces your body to continue to draw on stored fat for energy.
Low calorie fad diets, those that recommend consuming less than 1,200 calories a day, are geared to make you lose weight, not fat. When you hit the dieting plateau you get frustrated and start eating normal again and you start to put on fat easily. And ladies, as long as you start with light weight-training movements, you will not look like a muscle bound freak. He is certified nationally as a strength and conditioning coach and has published several scientific studies on Greens+ Products. Your body does not know the difference between starvation and crash dieting and little or no food for extended periods of time equals danger. This means that although you are dieting, you are not losing fat (or losing only a small proportion of fat) because your body has shut down is its fat-burning ability in order to preserve energy.
I’ll cover this in another article, but in the meantime, please stay away from fad and low calorie diets! Depending on your fitness and activity levels, one pound of muscle burns anywhere from 6 to 50 calories per day, just to maintain itself.